Queen of Action
As Michelle Yeoh branched out into dramatic fares like Crazy Rich Asians or Wicked, I always found myself saying, “Good for her!” When she starred in the multiverse action dramedy, Everything Everywhere All at Once, I was totally excited that she found something incredibly original that stood on its own, made its mark in cinema and had a way for her to throwback to her glory days in the Hong Kong martial arts world.
With her upcoming film, The Surgeon, the buzz is that there’s no big dramatic pretext; it was Michelle Yeoh returning to fighting off bad guys. The film recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and found itself getting in competitive bids between studios. The Hollywood Reporter is now reporting that Sony has come out on top and secured the distribution rights to the film in North America, Latin America, Italy, China and Hong Kong.
The Surgeon
In The Surgeon, Yeoh plays the titular surgeon who gets kidnapped in order to perform surgery on a patient, but she uses her knowledge of the human anatomy to fight back against the bad guys with medical precision. The movie comes from Thunder Road, which is the studio that produces the John Wick films (and is likely to point that out in the marketing), but what makes The Surgeon stand apart is that it is written and directed by real-life doctor Roshan Sethi, which is also likely to give it some cred in medical accuracy during its gory fight scenes.
Sethi even told THR that he is pushing hard to include his M.D. title in his credit to give the movie that extra edge, explaining, “The fact that it might be real is part of what makes it interesting to watch. You feel like you’re being exposed to something that you didn’t know before.”
What did we think?
Our EIC Chris Bumbray got to attend a screening of The Surgeon at this year’s TIFF and had a blast, saying in his 7/10 review, “The Surgeon seems like a no-brainer for either a high-end streamer or a genre-focused distribution company to pick up, with it being entertaining, action-packed, and very commercial. But it’s also refreshingly gruesome and doesn’t pull any punches as far as the medical gore goes. Imagine The Pitt if Dr. Robby had to kill a whole whack of bad guys, and you have an inkling of what The Surgeon is.”
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